Letter GUI — will it fit the page?

Your letter

Example letters

Do you need to tell people you used dictation software? That you got feedback on a note? These letters come from a place of care — if disclosure feels right, a warm PS does it. The button adds one; click again for a different wording.

What makes a letter look real

Blue over black. Real pens rarely write pure black; blue ink reads as a person, black as a printer.
One hand throughout. Mixing fonts looks fancy but backfires — on the FarmKind run, "Geoffrey" got two different f's in one word and it read as strange. Same hand, whole letter.
Imperfection, sparingly. A slightly wandering baseline, uneven margins, one crossed-out word. Perfect uniformity is the giveaway — this preview is more even than the machine's real output, which helps.
Real paper, real pen. A ballpoint or gel pen leaves pressure marks and ink pooling that no printer makes. Heavier paper feels like a decision.
The envelope sells it. Hand-addressed, a real stamp, maybe slightly crooked. The envelope is read first.
A PS reads personal. Afterthoughts are human. It is also the honest place to say a machine helped.
Signature by actual hand if you can — even one real pen stroke changes the object.

Machine settings — the working recipe

Recorded 2026-08-12 while timing the FarmKind Dear Geoffrey letter on yellow A5 (half sheet), Premium Ultra 34. Master copy in the vault iAuto note.

Machine

Pen up 4 · pen down 8 · installation pen position 7. Empty travel enabled (pen up position 0, threshold 10 mm). Offsets: horizontal −5, vertical −55. Multiple feed: 2.

Software

Resolution ratio: Resolution. Speed Custom: writing 1500, movement 1000. Unit: inches. Image limit 4000 px · tool size 0.3 mm · connection timeout 5 · automatic connection on, reconnect off · complete pop-up on, prompt sound off.

Character

Add left/right of character: 0/0. Baseline 100. Random float up/down: about the 4th notch. Number of amplitudes 1, squiggle 2. Initial random placement 0. Character width automatic. Nib: none, 0/0.

Font deformation

Random size 95–100 · random spacing 95–100 · random tilt −5 to 5 · random vertical stretch 95–100 · random horizontal stretch 95–100.

Stroke deformation (sliders, by eye)

Angular strength ≈ 20% · length strength ≈ 33–35% · performance ≈ 25%.

Measured

8 min writing + ~20 s page change = 8 min 20 s per 422-character A5 letter (0.88 characters per second; minutes ≈ characters ÷ 53).

loose-paper zone — keep light

Page

Margins Line spacing: 1.6× Pen — Uni-ball Eye UB-157

Sheet

Hand

Batch calculator

Sheets to print

Machines

Uses the current letter, size and machine timing. Excludes setup time — see the letter types beside this for what setup costs.

Types of letters, and what setup costs

Unique, one-off. Every letter is its own piece of writing. Budget the time to write the letter and the time to queue it on the machine — the printing itself (the times above) runs unattended, so you may not count it against your own hours.

Unique but formulaic (mail merge). "Hi Sally — how do you feel about X? That is really cool, I would love to do Y with you." Each letter still takes the machine the same time to write, but setup is one job: add about one hour to set up the mail merge, whether it is fifty letters or a thousand.

No uniqueness (reprints). The same letter, printed again and again. All the setup happens once; after that, reprints are cheap and easy to queue. Good for short thank-you notes sent to many places.